Africa: Migrant Deaths at Sea

Editor's Note

"These days, it takes a blockbuster tragedy for migrant boats to
reach the front pages - the quiet, regular additions to the
Mediterranean's death toll encountered on an almost-weekly basis by
rescuers, human rights activists and migrant communities themselves
are simply far too humdrum to make the mainstream news. In the past
two decades, almost 20,000 people are recorded as having lost their
lives in an effort to reach Europe's southern borders from Africa
and the Middle East." - Guardian, Oct. 3, 2013

With more than 300 dead or missing from the capsizing of the boat
with African migrants off the island of Lampedusa, migrant deaths
at sea are again in the news. But more such tragedies are
inevitable without changes in the fundamental factors at work. Just
as in the parallel case of migrants crossing the deserts along the
U.S-Mexican border, structural inequalities between rich and poor
regions of the world make such high-risk journeys an alternative to
joblessness and insecurity at home for large numbers of people. The
countries they try to reach, instead of establishing workable
systems of legal immigration and systems to protect those at risk,
concentrate on building higher barriers and expanding detention and
deportation programs.

In addition to such fundamental changes, critics of European policy
note, there are many practical steps that could be taken to ensure
that there are fewer deaths. These deaths, read a headline in the
Guardian, are "a litany of largely avoidable loss."

According to a BBC report on October 6, the survivors from
Lampedusa

"are to be placed under investigation for 'clandestine
immigration', as provided for by a controversial immigration law
pushed through by right-wing parties in 2002. The offence carries a
5,000-euro ($6,780) fine.

Italy has said it will amend immigration laws. Members of
parliament have complained that some of its provisions discourage
people from helping migrants in distress.

The fisherman who arrived first at the site of the accident, Vito
Fiorino, has accused the coast guard of wasting time by filming
footage of rescue efforts.

'They refused to take on board some people we'd already saved
because they said protocol forbade it,' he was quoted as saying by
Ansa news agency."

This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains three short articles with
background on the deaths near Lampedusa, and a press conference by
the UN's Special Rapporteur on Human Rights of Migrants, on October
3, the opening day of the UN's "High-level Dialogue on Migration
and Development."

Lampedusa - 300 or more dead in latest accident, what can be done
to stop migrant deaths at sea?

Italian authorities have so far recovered about 120 bodies from
yesterday's accident a very very short distance from the shores of
Lampedusa. Authorities believe there may be more than 150 bodies of
children, women, and men still to be recovered.

What can be done to prevent such deaths? It is certainly possible
that nothing could have prevented yesterday's disaster. This was
not a case of a disabled boat left to drift at sea while ships and
aircraft failed to assist. This was not a case involving a failure
to act promptly to rescue persons in distress. This was not a case
of a diplomatic dispute between countries over which country had
the responsibility to rescue and where rescued persons were to be
disembarked after rescue. It may turn out to be the case that
someone observed the overloaded migrant boat as it sailed from
Libya towards Lampedusa. If the migrant boat was observed by a
commercial or military ship, a rescue operation probably should
have been implemented immediately. But while the Mediterranean Sea
is crowded with ships, it is certainly possible that this boat
sailed unobserved from Libya to Lampedusa.

Could anything have been done to prevent these deaths?

Could anything have been done to prevent the deaths of 13 migrants
who drowned on the beach at Sicily last week? Or the 31 people who
drowned off the Libyan coast in July? Or the 20 who died near
Lesvos Island in Greece last December, the 89 who died in the
Strait of Gibraltar over 10 days in October-November 2012, or the
58 who died off the coast of Izmir, Turkey in September 2012? (For
a more complete list of reported deaths at sea consult Fortress
Europe's La Strage web page (the Massacre).
http://fortresseurope.blogspot.it/p/la-strage.html; in Italian)

As long as people move, whether forced to flee danger or to improve
their lives or for other reasons, there will be dangers on land and
sea. The dangers will always be greater when people are compelled
to move outside of legal channels. Creating more opportunities for
legal migration and creating an external procedure for seeking
refugee protection within the EU would help many people and would
reduce the numbers of people traveling by dangerous means. But
there will still be people unable to secure a visa or protection
who would be compelled to travel by sea.

There are many measures that can be taken by the EU to reduce the
numbers of people dying in the Mediterranean and off the coast of
western Africa. As a reminder, here is an excerpt from the
recommendations issued last year by the Parliamentary Assembly of
the Council of Europe in the report issued in the aftermath of the
deaths of 63 people on board the "left to die" boat that drifted in
the Mediterranean for two weeks. The recommendations made sense
then as they do now:

fill the vacuum of responsibility for an SAR zone left by a State
which cannot or does not exercise its responsibility for search and
rescue, such as was the case for Libya. This may require amending
the International Maritime Search and Rescue Convention (SAR
Convention)....;

ensure that there are clear and simple guidelines, which are then
followed, on what amounts to a distress signal, so as to avoid any
confusion over the obligation to launch a search and rescue
operation for a boat in distress;

avoid differing interpretations of what constitutes a vessel in
distress, in particular as concerns overloaded, unseaworthy boats,
even if under propulsion, and render appropriate assistance to such
vessels. Whenever safety requires that a vessel be assisted, this
should lead to rescue actions;

tackle the reasons why commercial vessels fail to go to the
rescue of boats in distress. This will require dealing with:

(1) the economic consequences for the rescuing vessel and its
owners, and the issue of compensation;
(2) the disagreement between Malta and Italy as to whether
disembarkation should be to the nearest safe port or to a port
within the country of the SAR zone. The International Maritime
Organization should be urged to find a solution to the matter and
step up its efforts towards a harmonised interpretation and
application of international maritime law;
(3) the fear of criminalisation (trafficking or aiding and abetting
irregular migration) by those who go to the rescue of boats
carrying irregular migrants, asylum seekers and refugees;
(4) legislation to criminalise private shipmasters who fail to
comply with their duty under the law of the sea, as is already the
case in certain Council of Europe member States;

ensure that, in accordance with the Hirsi v. Italy judgment of
the European Court of Human Rights, after the rescue operation,
people are not pushed back to a country where they risk being
treated in violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on
Human Rights;

tackle the issue of responsibility sharing, particularly in the
context of rescue services, disembarkation, administration of
asylum requests, setting up reception facilities and relocation and
resettlement, with a view to developing a binding European Union
protocol for the Mediterranean region. The heavy burden placed on
frontline States leads to a problem of saturation and a reluctance
to take responsibility;

respect the families' right to know the fate of those who lose
their lives at sea by improving identity data collection and
sharing. This could include the setting up of a DNA file of the
remains of those retrieved from the Mediterranean Sea. In this
context, the ongoing work of the International Committee of the Red
Cross (ICRC) and other organisations should be acknowledged and
supported.

Mediterranean migrant deaths: a litany of largely avoidable loss

There is a divide between those who prioritise the saving of lives
and those who insist on border enforcement

These days, it takes a blockbuster tragedy for migrant boats to
reach the front pages - the quiet, regular additions to the
Mediterranean's death toll encountered on an almost-weekly basis by
rescuers, human rights activists and migrant communities themselves
are simply far too humdrum to make the mainstream news. "The
reaction of a lot of us this morning was just 'yet again, yet
again' ... except this time it's even worse," Judith Sunderland, a
researcher with Human Rights Watch who specialises in migration,
told the Guardian. "What's chilling is to think that this could
have been prevented."

In the past two decades, almost 20,000 people are recorded as
having lost their lives in an effort to reach Europe's southern
borders from Africa and the Middle East. In 2011, at the height of
the Arab uprisings, more than 1,500 were killed in a single year.
Thursday's horrific scenes are only the latest in a long line of
similar, albeit less dramatic, boat disasters - a litany of largely
avoidable loss which inspired Pope Francis, on a visit to Lampedusa
earlier this year, to inveigh against the rich world's
"globalisation of indifference".

Activists and policymakers agree that a large portion of the blame
for migrant deaths must lie with the unscrupulous criminal gangs
who demand large payments for arranging people trafficking and
often use dangerously overcrowded and unseaworthy vessels for the
job. But on the question of how Europe should approach this
problem, there is considerable discord, dividing those who believe
far more needs to be done to prioritise the saving of lives, from
those who fear any shift in emphasis away from border enforcement
will only encourage people trafficking.

"If traffickers think they can smuggle people in with impunity,
that's an incentive for smuggling to increase," said Christopher
Chope, a Conservative MP and rapporteur for the Council of Europe's
committee on migration. But critics claim that the enforcement
posture adopted by both European nations and the continent's
supranational agencies such as the border control force Frontex
only serve to deny migrants vital humanitarian assistance and
increase the risk of boat deaths.

"What we really don't see is a presumption of saving lives; what we
get instead is every effort to shut down borders," said Sunderland,
who pointed out that security crackdowns on land crossings such as
the Greece-Turkey border only displaced migrant flows and often
forced more boats into the sea. "The only hope is that this latest
tragedy fundamentally shocks the conscience of Europeans and
European decision-makers into adopting a real life-saving approach
to migrants in the Mediterranean."

But more often than not attempts to forge a co-ordinated, effective
European response to irregular migration by boat have stumbled.
Following the Guardian's exposé of the "left-to-die" boat in 2011,
in which 61 migrants were left to perish slowly at sea despite
distress calls being sounded and their vessel's position being made
known to European authorities and Nato ships, an in-depth inquiry
by the Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly found that a
"catalogue of failures" had caused the deaths and recommended a
fundamental overhaul of European policy on migration; at the same
time the UN declared that all migrant vessels in the Mediterranean
should be considered by default as in distress, and thus in need of
rescue.

Yet although thousands of migrants have been rescued by the
coastguards of southern European countries such as Italy and Malta,
there still remains an absence of political will when it comes to
ensuring that vulnerable migrants don't fall through the cracks of
an intricate set of border and rescue policies and overlapping
regions of legal jurisdiction. In August the Italian authorities
ordered two commercial ships to rescue a migrant boat in the sea
and then demanded the ship's captains transport the migrants back
to Libya, a move that experts believe could discourage commercial
captains from attempting rescues at all and may be in breach of
international law.

At the end of this year, Eurosur - a new Mediterranean surveillance
and data-sharing system developed by the EU which, among other
things, would use satellite imagery and drones to monitor the high
seas and the north African coast - is due to go live. European
policymakers claim the technology will make a serious contribution
to saving migrant lives on the sea, but sceptics say that the
project is still primarily focused on preventing migrants reaching
Europe at all, and legislation needs to be redrafted to put
humanitarian concerns at the forefront of Eurosur's operations.

In the meantime, much more could be done to ensure that both
national coastguards and commercial vessels have both the
capability and incentives to be proactive when it comes to saving
the lives of some of the world's most vulnerable people.

"A terrible human tragedy is taking place at the gates of Europe.
And not for the first time," said Jean-Claude Mignon, head of the
Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly, in response to
Thursday's grim death toll. "We must end this now. I hope that this
will be the last time we see a tragedy of this kind, and I make a
fervent appeal for specific, urgent action by member states to end
this shame."

Without a drastic increase in political will across the European
continent, his wish is unlikely to be realised.

What the Italian press said about Lampedusa

After the death of at least 130 Somalian and Eritrean migrants off
the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa, the Italian (and
European) press is once again filled with words of pathos: the
human tragedy, the pictures of lined body bags and the tears of
Lampedusans for those who never reached them.

There is the Espresso magazine, who wants to nominate the small
island of Lampedusa for the Nobel prize. And there are those who
can't wait to see the end of the rescue operations to start a
debate about the role of the new Minister of integration Cécile
Kyenge and Laura Boldrini, president of the Chamber of Deputies.
According to Gianluca Pini, "the two women have on their conscience
all the illegal immigrants who died during these months because of
their goody two-shoes declarations of support for 'third world
countries'."

"I want the prime minister Enrico Letta to count the corpses here
with me," wrote Giusy Nicolini, mayor of Lampedusa, in a telegram
sent to Rome yesterday. "The sea is filled with dead bodies. It's
an infinite horror. This is enough, how much longer should we wait
after this?", she told journalists while assisting to the recovery
of the bodies from the sea.

According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, there were around
500 passengers from Eritrea and Somalia on the boat that left from
Libya.

The Italian press mostly used the expression barcone di immigrati
(pontoon of immigrants) or the word ecatombe to underline the
number of deaths, one of the highest in recent years.

Gabriele del Grande, freelance journalist and author of the blog
Fortress Europe in which he counts the number of deaths in the
European Union's "border war", claims the responsibility of the
tragedy lies with the Bossi-Fini legislation and blames the process
of visa permits that are very difficult to obtain. This situation
leads to refugees traveling for months in the Saharan desert,
arriving in Libya and then paying for a very risky cross over the
Mediterranean Sea.

Father Virginio Colmegna, president of the charity foundation
"Angelo Abriani" in Milan, writes on his blog hosted by the
Repubblica:

What happened today in Lampedusa has become a chilling normality.
Wrong laws, repressive measures against migration and lack of
interest from European countries that are not directly affected by
the daily arrival of migrants, haven't dampened the power of
criminal organizations that transport without any scruples those
who dream of Europe.

"Let's stop calling it 'a tragedy'," say the NGOs and the charities
who work to support the migrants after their arrival in Italy.
Savino Pezzotta, president of the Italian Council for Refugees,
accuses of demagoguery those politicians who proclaim that we need
to think of our "personal problems" first. "The slogan 'don't let
them enter Italy' won't solve problems," he says, "we need to
accompany them as refugees from their country of origin."

Just three days ago, Italian theater actor Ascanio Celestini was in
Lampedusa from where he wrote a diary piece for Il Fatto
Quotidiano:

In Lampedusa there are two graves. In one there are the dead, in
the other you find the living. They have one thing in common: they
are both nameless. Those two graves lie outside the small towns of
Contrada Cala Pisana and Contrada Imbriacola. They are respectively
the cemetery and the reception center for foreigners ... According to
data of the Ministry of the Interior it can accommodate 381 people,
but the mayor Giusi Nicolini says that there are currently more
than 1000, of which 100 are children.

Yesterday's loss is hardly an isolated incident however: according
to NGOs monitoring the situation, more than 13,000 have died at the
maritime borders of the European Union between 1988 and 2012, among
which 6,000 in the Sicily Channel alone. And the numbers of dead
have being going up. Just in 2011, UNHCR estimated that 1,500
asylum seekers, refugees and other migrants have died trying to
reach European shores.

Italian politicians are playing the usual blaming game: calling for
more involvement of the European Union, while turning a blind eye
to the fact that the militarization of the Mediterranean via its
FRONTEX agency contributes to traffickers taking more risks and
making the crossing less safe. And promises of investigating
fishermen for defaulting on their obligations of assistance
conveniently ignores that Italy has prosecuted fishermen in the
past, accusing them of 'facilitating illegal immigration' as
Lampedusa's mayor pointed out yesterday. The truth is, the legal
means to reach the European Union for protection reasons are
shrinking and now almost non-existent while lending a helping hand
is fast becoming a crime. The Italian government went as far as
announcing a national day of mourning and a minute of silence has
been observed in every school in Italy today. As if to better hide
that those are not just "unfortunate deaths", they are deaths by
policy.

* Jacques Enaudeau contributed to this post.

Press Conference by Special Rapporteur on Human Rights of Migrants

Migration had always been a fundamental human phenomenon, and the
human rights of migrants must be respected and enforced whether
their crossing was considered "illegal" or not, the Special
Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, François Crépeau, said
at a Headquarters press conference today.

"Migrants are human beings with human rights, not agents for
economic development and outputs," Mr. Crépeau said. "It's
essential that the discussion focuses on the human dimension. All
migrants are protected by international human rights law,
regardless of the administrative status or situation." Countries,
he pointed out, tended to focus on security issues when it came to
migrants, not taking into account that "99.99 per cent of irregular
migrants posed no security threat."

Yet despite the international legal frameworks in place to protect
the rights of migrants, Mr. Crépeau said they continued to suffer
from exploitation, xenophobic violence and abuse. States needed to
ratify humans rights treaties, particularly those pertaining to
migrants, and strengthen global migration governance. Whether or
not the crossing was "regular or irregular," migrants needed access
to education, health services, courts and tribunals, and proper
labour enforcement.

Many vulnerable groups, such as women, minorities, or the LBGT
(Lesbian Bisexual Gay and Transgender) community, were able to
demand access to their rights via their status as citizens, he
said. However, irregular migrants felt unable to advocate for their
own rights out of fear of being deported. Thus, millions of
migrants had their rights exploited every day, and States needed to
take concrete action on the ground to remedy that. For its part,
the United Nations needed to increase its presence in the global
discussion on migration governance, since States were often
reluctant to push the issue themselves due to domestic political
concerns over security and national identity.

Prasad Kariyawasam, member and former Chair of the Committee on
Migrant Workers, who was also present and speaking on behalf of
that Committee's current Chair, Abdelhamid El Jamri, stated that
although migrant workers were contributing to both their country of
employment and their country of origin "in big terms", their
"enormous" work was often overlooked and discounted.

The Migrant Workers Convention, he said, did not go beyond the
scope of the other human rights conventions, but it nevertheless
gave a very clear road map for how to implement and achieve those
rights on the ground. However, that Convention currently had only
47 State parties, and almost all were labour-sending countries
rather than labour-receiving countries. A strong approach to
combating the violation of migrants' rights required three pillars
— countries sending workers, transit countries, and receiving
countries. However as of now one of those pillars — that of the
receiving countries — was absent.

When asked about yesterday's tragedy in Lampedusa, Italy, in which
more than 100 migrants were killed and hundreds more missing after
their boat caught fire and capsized, Mr. Kariyawasam said that
migrants would continue to take such risks as long as there was a
cross-border supply and demand for work, minus sufficient legal
migration frameworks.

"Migrant workers are like water," he said. "They flow from where
the demand is, to where the supply can be [and] it's up the
international community to set up a regulatory mechanism for
workers to travel from point A to B when there is a need. That
supply and demand equation should be handled devoid of xenophobia."

Mr. Crépeau said that tragedies like that had not always existed,
and was a result of the "push factor" and the "pull factor" of
migrants being interrupted by a barrier, such as the
criminalization of irregular migration. However, such movement
would continue "in deserts, mountains, in the Mediterranean and the
Atlantic" until the channels of migration were opened to fulfil
labour needs.

"States need to think about their share of responsibility in those
deaths," he said of the incident in Lampedusa, adding that
increasing repression of migration merely handed the control of the
border over to smugglers and human traffickers. "Continuing to
treat irregular migration only by repressive measures will only
result in instances like what was seen last night," he stated.

Responding to several questions about migration issues across the
globe, Mr. Crépeau said that alternatives to the practice of
detaining irregular migrants were available, and needed be explored
in countries such as the United States and other labour receivers
which resorted to punitive measures when they should not.

He further said that society needed to take stock of the true costs
of doing business, a cost that included fair wages, rather than one
based on the exploitation of irregular migrants too often cowed
into working for less and fearful of reporting unsafe working
conditions. This could also mean re-evaluating the true cost of
commodities — be they strawberries, asparagus, domestic services or
meals in a restaurant.

Also responding to questions, Mr. Kariyawasam said that Member
States needed to be more proactive in addressing migrants' rights,
and to make the distinction between migrants and refugees, which
was a different category.

"The rights of migrants are still on the back burner," he said,
"and it's the responsibility of the Member States and the United
Nations to bring them to the fore."

AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with
a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.

AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please
write to this address to subscribe or unsubscribe to the bulletin,
or to suggest material for inclusion. For more information about
reposted material, please contact directly the original source
mentioned. For a full archive and other resources, see
http://www.africafocus.org